Anthony Clark's Blog: Living Sustainably

Growing Food at the Office

2009-11-21T22:49:17Z

While walking around the Union Square Greenmarket a few months ago in search of a new plant to add to the papyrus, ivy, and sedum already in my window, I came across red leaf lettuce sprouts being sold for just a few bucks. I was really hungry at the time, which made the idea of growing something I could eat even better. Now, just as I blog about taking part in the No Impact Experiment, it’s time to harvest my first crop! If you’re at all curious to try this yourself, look around online to see how easy it can be.

Eating and Drinking Green at NRDC

As I began to describe in my post on Monday, there are lots of ways NRDC makes it easy for us to lower our environmental impact while at work. NRDC stocks the kitchen with basics like hot chocolate, tea, fair-trade organic coffee—BioGems blend, a collaboration with Bean Trees that also supports our efforts to defend special wild places throughout the Americas—soy milk, and milk and half-and-half from Meadow Brook Farms in upstate New York. Each kitchen also includes a water cooler that delivers filtered NYC tap water.

When it comes to catering, NRDC’s food policy calls for choosing items with the smallest environmental impact. Vegetarian options must always be provided. Poultry and sustainably caught fish are the preferred animal options. Red meat is prohibited for good environmental reasons. I’m obviously painting the policy with very broad strokes. The challenge of measuring the impact of food choices can be quite difficult. Would a chicken that may have come from a huge commercial operation a thousand miles away really be a better than locally and sustainable raised lamb? Maybe not, but for the purpose of ease of implementation we follow these broad guidelines and then attempt to choose the most sustainable option we can find.

Foraging in the Neighborhood

During my no impact week I brought lunch to work every day to avoid the packaging that comes with take-out and minimize the amount of money I spent on food. Had I been looking for a sustainable lunch option I could’ve walked over to the Union Square Greenmarket and perused the offerings from the roughly 140 producers.

While walking around the market to take photos for this post I stumbled across Robin Puskas providing a cooking demonstration and recipes using Greenmarket ingredients. Check out her suggestion for putting together a better-than-Subway sandwich.

Access and Affordability

I am fortunate that NRDC chose a location for its New York office that is just a few blocks from the largest Greenmarket in the city—open on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays year-round. While local farmer’s markets are cropping up more regularly around New York City and around the country, with many now accepting food stamps/EBT cards, there are still far too many people who have little or no access to healthy and affordable food.

In some neighborhoods food co-ops are fantastic solutions for both access and affordability. As non-profit organizations supported by their members, food co-ops can provide very high-quality food at prices often far below for-profit chains. Becoming a regular customer at my first co-op—Glut Food Co-op in Maryland just over the line from DC—was a revelation in how pleasant and painless (financially) food shopping could be. At Glut the entire experience was about the quality of the food and the health of the customers.

More to Chew On

Back here in New York progress is being made to extend the reach of local farmer’s baskets into more corners of the city. And when traveling on the New York State Thruway you will now find locally grown food options at the rest stops. Granted that change is a very small and overdue, especially given that New York is the nation’s second-leading grower of apples. We also need big changes in the way big agriculture operates in this country (more in a future post). Nonetheless, these kinds of changes are helping to throw off the blinders about what is possible and where when it comes to food.

Diving Into the Trash at NRDC

2009-11-17T00:04:37Z

Monday's "Trash" Generated at the Office

With the first weekday of this experiment nearly complete I can say (and show above) that my impact has been small. Other than that napkin I used out of habit during lunch I haven't produced any non-compostable or non-recyclable waste worth mentioning. Missing from the photo are the two eggshells from breakfast now sitting in the compost container in the freezer awaiting a trip across the street to the compost bin in our community garden. Tonight after work I was called to help my brother-in-law with a screen test. He provided dinner from a great Mexican restaurant in his neighborhood. I chose a meal with just a piece of wax paper and a sheet of aluminum foil.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

This impressively small amount of workday waste was made easy by the comforts of home we enjoy at our office. Each floor is equipped with a kitchen that includes dishware, silverware, mugs, cups, a sink, and a dishwasher. Each kitchen also includes a hook with two reusable bags for staff to take with them while out getting lunch or running errands. And if you do need a napkin you grab one made from 100% post-consumer recycled paper fibers.

The Simple Steps to a Small Footprint

Below are the reusable things that made it so easy to avoid paper and plastic.

About the Rest of the Waste

Even with our best efforts to reduce our consumption here at NRDC, there is no getting around the fact that an office of almost 140 people is going to make some trash. The key is to pull as much of the recyclable content out of the stream before it reaches the truck down on 20th Street. To achieve that goal we've contracted with haulers who can accept just about every kind of paper, plastic, glass, and metal we can collect. And we separate out the redeemables for a guy who lives in the neighborhood. Here is a snashot of what goes where when it leaves the office:

And where do those numbers come from? Picking through lots of bags like this:

What's in the Bag Doesnt Lie (or Why We Picked Through Our Own Trash at 8:00 in the Morning for Five Days Including Saturday)

Earlier this year a handful of NRDCers conducted a waste audit at the New York Office. We arrived at the office in the morning before the rest of the staff to pick through the previous day's trash (set aside for us by the cleaning staff) and methodically measured the weight and counted the number of recyclable items that had carelessly been tossed. We made both quantitative and qualitative notes about what we found in the bags to help gain a clear picture of what we were sending to the landfill and how we send less.

The Quick and Dirty on NRDC's Waste Audit

We began our audit on Tuesday morning with Monday's trash and then continued for a total of five days. We came in on Saturday morning so we could capture the effects of changes in behavior at the end of the week (Hey, it's Friday. Let's treat ourselves to take out and lots of unnecessary packaging) and measure the effect of our refrigerators being cleaned out (as they are on a rotating Friday schedule). Keeping the audit a secret to get valid results meant that all week long we had to work quickly and quietly in the freight elevator areas to avoiding attention. It was a nice change on Saturday to leisurely put on our rubber gloves and weigh coffee grinds down to the tenth of an ounce!

Hooray for Us, and Some Room for Improvement

When the last used tea bag had been counted and all the trash returned to its bags we crunched our data and found that, as a whole, our office is doing quite well. In the upper left corner of trash bag photo above you can see a few of the items that should've been recycled: aluminum dish from Chipotle and aluminum foil, plastic drink cups, Starbucks coffee cup sleeves, frozen food box, and a draft copy of a wonky carbon allowance allocation chart (if interested, the final version is in this Cap 2.0 policy brief). There were also some coffee grinds and a tea bag or two that should've been composted (for more details on NRDC's compost program check out today's post from Lindsi. That bag contained more "mistakes" than most.

Audit Your Office

Conducting the trash audit was one of the most satisfying projects I've been a part of in my 2.5 years here at NRDC. The work was important and concrete and results garnered a lot of attention around our office. Our colleagues were grateful for the care we put into the crafting the audit and for the ideas about how we might all perform better.

Think your office is already doing a pretty good job on the trash front? Or know that your coworkers are doing more than their share to trash the planet? If you'd like more information on how to take a closer look at your office's waste then drop me a note in the comments section.

Preparing for No Impact

2009-11-16T04:04:17Z

To be honest, I don’t expect taking part in NRDC's No Impact Experiment to be hard. As someone who lives in New York City and works for NRDC I am provided everyday with lots of options for going about my business with a kid-sized carbon footprint. The sustainable systems that surround me will make taking a few extra steps toward a no impact week—or at least very, very low impact—pretty easy.

While I will share details of the personal choices I make each day to lower my resource consumption, the focus of my posts will be on the larger systems in my neighborhood, city, and (especially) office that make it simple to live a low-carbon life. My expectation is that while reading my blog and that of my colleague and fellow NRDC NY Office Eco-Committee Member Lindsi describing just how good we have it you may become a little jealous. My hope is that you will also be motivated to advocate for changes in your office and in your city or town that provide you and your coworkers and neighbors new ways to reduce unnecessary consumption, shrink your carbon footprints, and save money.

NYC & NRDC: Interlocking Systems of Sustainability

I live in Manhattan just a few steps away from my subway stop with a community garden across the street (more on the community garden later in the week). When I arrive at NRDC’s New York Office—with its location chosen in part for its convenient access to many forms of public transportation—I enter another system designed to meet my needs and allow me to do my work as efficiently as possible.

Follow Our No Impact Chronicles

Throughout this week Lindsi and I will be blogging about how we reduce our consumption at home and in the office, including our broader efforts as member’s of the office Eco-Committee, in the following areas: TRASH (Monday), TRANSPORTATION (Tuesday), FOOD (Wednesday), ENERGY (Thursday), and WATER (Friday). Please check back daily here at Switchboard for one or both of our posts on our progress in the coming days. Whether you too are participating in No Impact Week or if just have questions, comments, or suggestions be sure to contribute to this experiment by leaving a comment.